I'm in Kansas City, Missouri. My office is about 1 mile East of the state line. I'm pretty excited about the community impact of this and I only live and work nearby.
From my own experience working on a community wireless project in St. Louis, the benefit of a 1Gbit/s fiber uplink (or several) would be that you could use newer 5GHz radios with MIMO features to build out >=50Mbit/s distribution for that uplink over a few square miles. So, 1Gbit/s could be parted out to 20 end users getting 50mbit/s each, and with an infrastructure cheaper than running fiber or some other wired medium directly to those 20 users.
50mbps x 200 users = 10,000mbps
Arithimetic aside, Ubiquiti is quickly changing the Wisp world. At Freenet, we switched from Canopy and upgraded our backhauls to Ubiquiti Airmax and saved money in the process. I am typing this now from a mesh node connected via a NanoStationM5!
Given my experience with city-wide wireless in Lawrence, ubiquitous WiFi in KCK really needs to happen, IMHO.
As for why upload speeds are awful, my experience has been that it is a trade-off that has been calculated by the ISP. But not in the way I suspected. Any link level device that uses a single (simplex) medium (wifi, fixed wireless, mobile wireless, cable modems, DSL modems, etc. as opposed to Ethernet, which is generally duplex) only has so much bandwidth available.
At the WISP I worked for, we used to use Canopy 900mhz radios to provide fixed wireless service as well as backhaul for our city-wide mesh network. Since these radios only had ~3.3mbps aggregate bandwidth, we had to decide how to allocate it. In our case, we chose something like 5:1 download to upload ratio. This was a conscious choice about how best to use the available spectrum/bandwidth. I believe the same is true for cable/DSL media. Please feel free to correct me.
Freenet has been pushing hard to work with the City of Lawrence on a fiber project that would be very similar to what Google would like to do. Having this happen in KC, KS will, I think, only help the Lawrence project.
If I am not mistaken, KC,KS is also getting 2000 Cerner jobs sometime in the next year(s). I can imagine the presence of Google Fiber will help draw a lot more area tech companies. At least I hope so.
https://cloudtrax.com/overview2.php?id=freenet_production
Of particular interest is that the mesh admin tool / firmware they're using, which is based on OpenWRT, actually underreports the number of clients and traffic because of its size. The operators say the real figures are order(s) of magnitude larger.
I only work on web apps these days, so I miss the days of feeling completely overwhelmed by weather, a power outage, a fiber being cut, or, especially, climbing water towers.